So Where are All the Miracles? (Part 3) Judges 6:1-13

Judges 6:13 (NASB95)  ¹³ Then Gideon said to him, “O my lord, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us? And where are all His miracles which our fathers told us about, saying, ‘Did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt?’ But now the Lord has abandoned us and given us into the hand of Midian.”

Do you believe that modern Western Christians should expect miracles from God, or are those only for Bible days and primitive third world countries?

Most of the discussions I have heard on this question do not use a lot of Scripture in support of their positions, so I think the answer to this question might best be answered by looking at someone in the Bible who pretty much asked the same question. 

Actually Gideon had three questions, three questions that every Christian needs to answer for his own time.

The story of Gideon is familiar, though many of the details are not.  The nation of Israel, God’s people, “did what was evil in the sight of the LORD” (Judges 6:1). 

This was not a single event but a way of life.  Chapter two of Judges gives an overview of the book as well as an overview of the history of Israel in this period.  Under Moses, God had delivered the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and gave them their own land.  After Moses died, the nation was governed by Joshua, someone that Moses had mentored and who God gave as the nation’s leader after Moses had asked God to give them someone to lead them after he died.

But then Joshua died, and there was no clear leader from God.  There were still people alive who had seen the mighty works of God, but then they died as well.    “And there arose another generation after them who did not know the LORD, nor yet the work which He had done for Israel.   Then the sons of Israel did evil in the sight of the LORD and served the Baals (the gods of the nations among whom they lived) (Judges 2:10-11).

And such was the time of Gideon.  The people did evil in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord gave them into the hand of the Midianites, who oppressed them severely for 7 years.  But the people cried out to God.

So the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon.  We don’t have details, but he didn’t seem to have appeared as an angel but as a man.  The angel greets him with: “The LORD is with you, O valiant warrior.”

Gideon then responds with his three questions.  The first question is actually implied rather than stated.  He starts a question with an assumption.  “If God is with us, then why . . .?”  You can reverse the question like this.   If these things happened to us, can we really say that God is with us?  Or simply, is God really with us?

To modern ears, that question is ambiguous.  Is it a question of location, looking for the answer to, where is God?  And many modern Christians answer it in that way.  They quickly assert God’s presence in their lives at all times, while the world could be crashing in around them.  God offers them comfort in their affliction, but He does nothing to mitigate or relieve the affliction.

But for Biblical questions, we need to let the Bible answer them.  Rather than interpreting the Bible by our circumstances, we need to interpret our circumstances by the Bible.

The Bible talks about God being with people quite often in the Bible.  And when you read the relevant passages, you realize He is not talking about the mere fact of His presence, but that His presence is to be our assurance of His help, not simply in enduring problems but overcoming them, not just comforting us in the midst of our problems but delivering us out of our problems.    

I have added to the end of this paper a list of all those Bible references. [see next article God with us]   Don’t take my word for it.  Look at these passages and see the willingness of God to help His people and what that help looks like.

So in Gideon’s mind, God being with someone tells that person that God is there to deliver that person.  The Bible often notes troubling times and events for God’s people.  The question is: what does God expect or want to do with them?  Should we just endure them with a smile, or should we expect God to do something about the problems themselves?  I think the passages clearly show that God wants to deliver us out of these problems and not just leave us in them.

So Gideon’s second question is:  Why have all these bad things happened to us?   Many modern Christians would consider Gideon idealistic or naïve to even ask the question.  Of course, bad things happen to us.  They happen all the time.  It’s all part of the program. 

But God had very specifically spelled out for Gideon’s people the blessings that He wanted to give to his people (Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28).  Those chapters also clearly spelled out the consequences if the people rejected God’s way of life. 

The people had turned away from God as their basic pattern of life, and what they were now enduring, God had told them long ago that they would.  But wait.  The angel had said that God was with him.  The Hebrew text is in the singular.  The angel was saying that God was with Gideon, not ‘you’ as a people.  But Gideon didn’t see God as being with him apart from Him being with the whole nation.  Gideon wasn’t worried about God being with him but whether God was with his nation.

So Gideon’s second question shows that what the nation of Israel was now experiencing was something that he believed God should have protected the people from.

Are our lives supposed to be one long trial and tribulation until we die and go to heaven?  Look at Psalm 34.  This hadn’t been written by the time of Gideon and long before our time.  But Christians need to decide whether it applies to them today and whether this is all poetic hyperbole or promises you can take to the bank.  The following are excerpts from that psalm:

¹I will bless the Lord at all times; His praise shall continually be in my mouth.

⁴I sought the Lord, and He answered me, and delivered me from all my fears.

⁶This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all his troubles.

⁷The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear Him, and rescues them.

⁸O taste and see that the Lord is good; how blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him!

⁹O fear the Lord, you His saints; for to those who fear Him there is no want.

¹⁰The young lions do lack and suffer hunger; but they who seek the Lord shall not be in want of any good thing.

¹⁷The righteous cry, and the Lord hears and delivers them out of all their troubles.

¹⁸The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.

¹⁹Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all.

²⁰He keeps all his bones, not one of them is broken.

If Psalm 34 doesn’t apply to us today as promises from God, then about ¾ of the Bible (the Old Testament) has become essentially irrelevant to our lives.  And what does the New Testament teach?  Sixty percent of that is the gospels and the book of Acts, where the sick were healed and needs were met, whether running out of wine at a wedding or feeding thousands of people in the wilderness.   

We may say today that God was perfectly justified in sending the Midians to oppress the Israelites, but I think we tend to err on the side of expecting too little from God rather than too much.

So Gideon’s third question: if God be with us, then where are all His miracles?  Gideon lived in Bible days, but in his time, miracles were a distant memory.  They happened a long time ago to people now dead, but if God is with a people, any people, of course He would do them again to meet their needs.  That’s what a God would do.  On our part, we worship God, give Him His due in our offerings and in our obedience to His commands, but God on His part is to deliver His people from their enemies and bless them in their lives. 

Gideon actually asked a fourth question which he asked to help answer his third question: “Did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt?  And now the Lord has abandoned us and given us into the hand of Midian.” v.13  The point is that God had done great things for them in the past, doing great miracles and delivering them from their enemies.  And now He abandons them?  It doesn’t make sense.  Why would God do so much for us in the past and then just let us go? 

He was arguing with God.  (See my last article on Sodom and Gomerica about arguing with God.)  He said that if God was with them, then there should have been miracles.  If God delivered them from Egypt, it makes no sense for God to just give up on them now and leave them in the hands of Midian. 

Christians like to quote Romans 8:32 (NASB95): ³² He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?

It’s the same principle.  God loves us so much to send His Son to die for us, but then He leaves us to suffer innumerable things that can make our lives hard and miserable?  We are encouraged by the hope of heaven where all pain, sorrow, and tears will be done away with, but we can be easily confused by the state of our lives now.

The time of Gideon was not a time of miracles.  But Gideon said it should have been.  So what happens?  God then uses Gideon to bring about the very miracle that he was asking for.  God didn’t deliver Israel apart from a human being doing the work.  And the human being He chose and used was the same person who questioned an angel of God about what God should be doing. 

God wasn’t angry with Gideon for questioning what He was doing or not doing.  Gideon was named in the Faith Hall of Fame of Hebrews 11.  Gideon’s faith showed itself in his insistence that God do miracles again in his time. 

No doubt Gideon had great faith to attack a huge army with only 300 men.  But he hadn’t attacked anybody when God called him, and why did God do that?  Was it just random, an exhibition of God’s grace?  Or is it that the kind of person who expected God to do miracles because that’s what it means for God to be with somebody is the kind of person who could attack a large army with 300 men?

A person who is not expecting miracles from God is a lot less likely to act in a situation like this than somebody who is.  The person not expecting a miracle will look at the situation, become full of fear, and then not go through with it.  The person expecting a miracle would say, of course, it looks impossible, but that’s what a miracle is.  And I can’t blame God for not doing a miracle if I don’t expect Him to.

Notice that God didn’t deliver Israel apart from a human being actually confronting the enemy in a situation that should have scared his boots off.  Gideon was hesitant at first, making sure that he was hearing all this right.  But I doubt anyone else could have pulled this off who didn’t begin with this expectation that God should have done a miracle here a long time ago.

We are often told today not to expect miracles, that they were for a time long past, that those were unique times, and that we don’t need miracles today because we now have the complete Bible, where they only had bits and pieces back then.  The problem is that I don’t see anything in this complete Bible that says that miracles are not for us.  On the contrary, it gives every impression that miracles are to be a part of the normal Christian life. 

A church in Gideon’s time could have told him the same thing, that the age of miracles was past.  They were now in the land of promise, and signs and wonders only happened to show the Egyptians and the nations the truth of Israel’s revelation and Israel’s special place in God’s economy. 

Sort of like the Christian Church today.  The Bible is the record to show the truth of the message. 

But a problem happened in Gideon’s time which required a miracle.  Now what?  And problems happen today that require miracles, but many of us seem well content to leave them to their natural course, whether it is an early death, years of miserable suffering, or just plain evil.  Gideon wasn’t just content with what was happening.  He thought things should be different, and God used him to change them.